Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to platforms for simulating the action of human breathing and/or testing ventilator performance, and more particularly to systems and methods for significantly enhancing such platforms to support full function etiologic-based breath simulation and to provide fully operator-configurable breathing patterns, patient respiratory muscular effort waveform characteristics and patient parameter values.
Existing ventilator test platforms have limited configurability typically providing only the capability to select one out of a pre-determined set of breathing effort (muscle effort) waveforms for testing a range of intensity of breathing behavior. Similarly, existing mechanisms, such as test lungs, for simulating spontaneously breathing patients to test ventilator performance typically provide a pre-set breathing effort waveform thus limiting the ability of respiratory device manufacturers to comprehensively test their products and the ability of educators to teach appropriate respiratory care for disease-specific etiologic-based respiratory scenarios.